The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The leading international forum for literary culture

March 31, 2016

One of the pleasures of press day (on any paper, I should hope) is seeing readers' letters fall into place on the page, and marvelling at the unique knowledge they're prepared to share (when they're not spoiling for a fight, that is). The example below, from this week's issue of the TLS, begins as a response to some observations in the paper's NB column about the current scarcity of decent second-hand bookshops in Oxford, and turns into something else . . . .

March 24, 2016

When J. M. G. (full name Jean-Marie Gustave) Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize in 2008, the Swedish Academy called him “an author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”. This strikes me as a fine specimen of the higher waffle; either that or – “beyond and below the reigning civilization”? – something was lost in translation. And yet I can see what they mean. Le Clézio has long focused on the marginalized and downtrodden in society, using his novels as a means to explore issues such as sexual exploitation, political oppression and environmental degradation. It hasn’t always made for good fiction; his last two published (and as yet untranslated) novels, Ourania(2005), and Ritournelle de la faim, published weeks before the Nobel announcement, come to mind.

But when Le Clézio is good, he’s very good. His first novel, Le Procès-verbal, published in 1963 when he was twenty-three and translated as The Interrogation, remains a strange and brilliant book. Some critics saw affinities with the nouveau roman but I think it’s out on its own: experimental, yes, but completely original. It’s arguably his best book.

The story stars a bookbinder whose work I've admired for some time now, Michael Curran of the Tangerine Press, as well as that man of many talents, Billy Childish – both of them have interesting things to say, I think, within the rather straitened either/or context of this report. It tells us that we live in an age of analogue versus digital, books versus ebooks, traditional craftsmanship versus PDFs and print-on-demand. Does it really have to be like this?

March 18, 2016

The Man Booker International longlist was announced last week and I’m pleased to report that the TLS has covered – or is poised to cover – all thirteen books on it. It’s an interesting selection, pleasingly diverse, and it affirms, I think, the current rude health of literary translation.

The award is a new-look prize, folding in the now-defunct Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (sponsored by the soon-to-be-defunct Independent print product) with the former Man Booker International Prize, which was a rather odd biennial award for a body of work published in English or available in English translation. The new Man Booker International will run every year and is awarded for a single novel, published in the past year in English translation. The prize money is £50,000 – to be shared between the author and translator. The other shortlistees each get £2,000, to be shared in the same way.

March 17, 2016

A declaration of interest: I am a Liar. And I am not only a Liar, but a proudly unionized Liar: for I am a founding member of the notorious Liars' League.

This organization's sole purpose is a noble one: to bring together two species of Liar, actors and writers, to entertain an audience for one evening every month with a selection of short stories. The writers write, the actors read (sometimes doing the police in different voices), the audience listens and, as the Liars' League slogan has it, "everybody wins". I'm very much on the fringe of the group but, from that perspective, it appears to be a formula that works.

And as Liars' League approaches its ninth anniversary and its 100th event (not counting those hosted by its offshoots in New York, Hong Kong, Portland, Blackpool and various literary festivals), it would seem to prove something else, too: that that rotten old lie about the short story being dead is the worst one of the lot . . . .

March 16, 2016

Some lines from the poem "Behaviour of Money" by Bernard Spender (Poems 1940–1942) came to mind on a balmy Saturday afternoon earlier this month, when I attended a one-day event called The Maximum Wage: A performance publishing extravaganza.

"The poor were shunted nearer to beasts. The cops recruited. The rich became a foreign community. Up there leaped quiet folk gone nasty,quite strangely distorted, like a photograph that has slipped."

Hosted by the artists David and Ping Henningham, collaborating as Henningham Family Press, Maximum Wage was inspired by an observation made by George Orwell in his essay "The Lion and the Unicorn" (1941): "A man with £3 a week and a man with £1,500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot".

March 11, 2016

Camp set by migrants at the Greek-Macedonian border near the Greek village of Idomeni, on March 10, 2016. Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP/Getty Images

By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

Cradle of the Enlightenment. Birthplace of many wonderful writers and composers, and home to some of the finest works of art and architecture. But Europe has also been the site of innumerable religious and civil conflicts. And, of course, in the past century the continent experienced two catastrophic wars and one of the greatest crimes in history. What is now the European Union was founded in the 1950s partly in an attempt to ensure that hostilities wouldn’t break out on the continent again. It wasn’t able to prevent the non-EU member Yugoslavia from erupting into civil war in 1992–5, and the country’s consequent break-up into six sovereign states. But France and Germany have been locked together in a permanent loving embrace. Meanwhile, the eastern half of the continent effectively disappeared behind the Iron Curtain before re-emerging in the late 1980s and early 90s. Then came the euro, and the expansion of the Union, to its current membership of twenty-eight countries (minus that serial non-joiner right in the middle, Switzerland), with several more waiting to join: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and – more problematically – Turkey.

March 09, 2016

Thomas Chatterton wasn't the only young man struggling to make a living in London in the 1760s. The painter George Romney was likewise trying to make his mark and not getting very far. Eventually, his determination paid off, however, and in later years he had to adapt his working methods in order to keep up with the demand for portraits. These were lucrative labours that came at a high personal cost: as time went on, his health suffered and he found it difficult to carry out his schemes for paintings on a grander scale, on historical and literary themes. Such ambitions mattered deeply in the art world of the time. As Norma Clarke put it in the TLS: "It is a commonplace that history painting was vaunted as the most elevated pictorial endeavour, but it might be more accurate to say that it consolidated the mythical stories the nation was telling itself".

The sketch above is one in a sequence from the early 1790s that testifies to Romney's passion for Shakespeare: it depicts the banquet scene from the third act of Macbeth (the one with Banquo's gatecrashing ghost). It also stands in, intriguingly, for the implicit finished painting itself, which Romney was never to execute . . . .

March 08, 2016

On a recent cold evening, Gloria Steinem was gently escorted on to the stage at the Emmanuel Centre, a listed building tucked around the corner from Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament and various other institutions of hierarchy and power in central London.

Steinem draws a crowd. At eighty-one, with decades of feminist activism behind her, she has witnessed a great deal of societal change: distortions and corrections and new frustrations. The seats were sold out – all 1,000 of them, at £25 a pop. And the auditorium (“completely circular and supported by 24 pairs of marble columns, with natural light flooding that [sic] through a huge glass dome and arched windows, finished off with original polished English oak panels along the walls”) was full, mostly of women – well-heeled women at that, with great hair and great coats.

Steinem was followed on to the stage by her interviewer Emma Watson, she of Harry Potter and also the UN “HeForShe” speech (“If men don’t have to be aggressive in order to be accepted, women won’t feel compelled to be submissive. If men don’t have to control, women won’t have to be controlled” etc), who is now the face of a Feminist book club.

Here was youth beside experience: fashionable feminism beside that which has endured. Steinem was lively, bright and kind, not hardened. Yet when Watson read out a statistic from the book Sex and World Peace that she found astonishing – “…more lives are lost through violence against women from . . .

"What do you say to a simple inscription", Oscar Wilde wrote to a friend on December 7, 1886:

To the MemoryofThomas ChattertonOne of England's greatest poets and sometime pupil at this school

The plan for a memorial tablet to Chatterton on the façade of his old school, Colston's in Bristol, came to nothing. Wilde and his friend Herbert Horne were not alone, however, in their admiration, as Wilde went on to show: "I was very nearly coming to fetch you the night of the fog to come and hear my lecture on Chatterton at the Birkbeck, but did not like to take you out on such a dreadful night. To my amazement I found 800 people there! And they seemed really interested in the marvellous boy". . . .